Along the Buffalo Bayou toward downtown sits a pyramid monument. While the stone blocks are often a playground for families during weekend picnics, the structure's true purpose is distinctly more somber. It is a memorial to fallen police officers. We mourn every officer who falls in the line of duty, but it is something folks almost expect. That thin blue line will inevitably bleed red. And another officer's name will be engraved.

The assassination of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland is something different. There was no shootout with armed police. No ambush of an officer walking his beat. McLelland and his wife were killed in their home - a murder, just like the drive-by shooting of Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse a month earlier. Investigations for all three murders currently focus on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang, which likely struck as retaliation for crackdowns on the gang's leadership.

Prosecutors are often quick to receive criticism, but that is because our public attorneys aren't merely supposed to send criminals to jail, they're supposed to do justice. Prosecutors are charged with embodying the ideals of the Constitution. The public face of our criminal justice system doesn't live behind a badge, it lives in a court room. These attacks on our prosecutors are an attack on our very sense of social order. Someone has declared war on justice herself, and we need a response befitting the severity of the crime.

A federal prosecutor has already withdrawn from a major case in Houston against the Aryan Brotherhood out of fear for his security and that of his family. The chilling message is far too resonant of drug gang violence in Mexico, and that makes it all the more terrifying. How long until the next attack on a prosecutor? Or a district attorney? Or a federal office building? We shouldn't wait until the next Oklahoma City before the full strength of national law enforcement rains down on a vile gang of domestic terrorists that finds strength and association with our nation's despicable heritage of white supremacists.

There are policy ideas that can strike at the core of this homegrown infestation: Reform prisons so that they are no longer incubators of criminal gangs. Implement a nationwide system to better ensure that guns do not end up in the hands of criminals.

But Texas needs an immediate response, and our leadership has been far too quiet on the matter. We hope our governor and attorney general will find inspiration from hard-nosed fighters like Rudy Giuliani, who responded to organized crime with an unrelenting strength that left no question as to the certainty of punishment. Texas needs a massive law enforcement effort that will bring together state and federal agencies not only to capture the people responsible and destroy their underlying organizations, but send a message to other groups that may even for a moment consider similar attacks. What happens in Texas resonates through the rest of the nation. We have the racketeering laws to bring these gangs to justice, but we need the leadership. The time to act is now, before any proper response includes building another memorial.